Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Init replacement

[Evan Powers]

On Sunday 04 May 2003 12:49 pm, Björn Lindström wrote:
> SGML (and thus HTML) was never originally intended to be human
> readable/hackable. The same goes for XML. It is designed to be
> easily _parsed_, not easily _read_.

I think you've made an excellent point here, one people should not quickly 
overlook. Though I'll take a slightly different perspective.

XML isn't intrinsically harder to read than any other general-purpose 
expressive system. When humans say that it is, what they're really doing is 
complaining that they cannot use domain-specific sub-syntaxes. (Or rather, 
that they are discouraged from doing so.)

Example. Mathematical notation isn't /necessary/, people could just write "a 
quantity named y equals the indefinite integral of f, a function of a 
quantity named x, times the derivative of the quantity x". But they never do, 
instead preferring to write "y=", a certain squiggle, and "f(x)dx".

Does anyone actually think a human is ever going to (voluntarily) write an 
equation of even moderate complexity in MathML?

My point is this:

Starting and stopping most services is a task that can be broken down into 
execing or fork-execing another program with a particular environment, 
particular command line arguments, and particular input and output 
redirections. Shell is a domain-specific language particularly suited to 
expressing these operations.

I won't say that XML has no place, or that script snippets shouldn't be 
embedded within an XML document, or that the script a human writes shouldn't 
be immediately translated into its XML equivalent. I am saying, however, that 
humans will insist on writing in the shell domain-specific language where it 
is more convenient for them to do so, and that forcing them to do otherwise 
in the name of anything is a long-term design mistake.

Which I suppose is a quite strong statement to make after all.

Evan

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